Karl Mannheim's contribution to a conceptual framework towards establishing objective knowledge in the social sciences has been overlooked and neglected. The paper discusses and reevaluates particularly Mannheim's concept of relationism which he used for clarifying the possibility of a "dynamic synthesis of perspectives" as the task of sociology of knowledge. One of the functions of Mannheim's conceptual framework was to narrow the gap between the techno-scientific or empiricist paradigm of knowledge and the humanistic-hermeneutical paradigm by a set of mediations which (...) shifted the emphasis from facts to the way of looking at them through concepts and terms which are never purely experiential, i.e. independent of interpretation. The author stresses the epistemological fertility of the relationist model of truth in view of recent insights of sociology of science. (shrink)

The following essay is part of a study which aims at grounding the concepts of freedom—personal, sociopolitical, metaphysical—and a variety of their combinations in the unique ontological structure of selfhood and its dialectical unfoldings. The claims of both hard determinism and absolute freedom are rejected.

At first glance it seems to be merely a curious accident that existentialist philosophers, like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre should relate to Husserl's phenomenology as Kierkegaard on the one hand, and Feuerbach and Marx on the other related to Hegel. The latter argued that since the cognitive I is merely a concrete real being, it cannot transcend its spacio-temporal existence and look at the world from the perspective of the absolute Being or God. Neither can human consciousness reveal in itself (...) the “truth” of all Being or develop the “truth” in its own confinement dialectically. Under these attacks the identity-philosophy of German idealism collapsed. (shrink)